English

Noun

solicitant ‎(plural solicitants)

1. One who solicits.
   • 1859, Charles Mackay, Life and Liberty in America, page 83:

     The ante-chambers of the President are daily thronged with solicitants—with men who think they helped to make the President, and who are consequently of opinion that the President should help to make them.

   • 2006, Xiofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China:

     The communication between the medium and the human solicitants, described by both the medium and Pu, was conducted through informal yet polite conversation.

   • 2008, Asunción Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico:

     In 1592, the papacy assigned the Inquisition jurisdiction over solicitation among the clergy; it thus enabled the Holy Office to pursue solicitation and solicitants in the peninsula and the oversea dominions.

   • 2011, Kregg Hetherington, Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay, page 108:

     But delicate as it was, it was this connection between solicitants and a bundle of papers somewhere in the IBR system that made landownership official.

   • 2013, Walter Stahr, Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man, page 258:

     Solicitants for office besiege him, and he of course finds his hands full for the present.

2. (Catholicism, historical) A priest who abused the confessional to solicit women.
   • 1840, The Orthodox Presbyterian Theological Review and Missionary Recorder:

     How like to the conduct of a Titular Bishop of Derry, who, when a Priest was accused of the crime of "solicitant at confession," expressed his abhorrence of the offence, and punished the offender by removing him to a better parish!

   • 1894, James Strong, Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, volume 9, page 861:

     Solicitant, one who, abusing the privacy of the confessional, tempts women to a violation of chastity.

   • 1898, Walter Walsh, The Secret History of the Oxford Movement, page 118:

     That the Confessional has been grossly used for immoral purposes, by evil-disposed priests, and that to a gigantic extent in the Church of Rom, is amply proved, beyond the possibility of refutation, by the Bulls of the Popes themselves against solicitant priests.